It’s the early afternoon. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld walk into a bar. It’s the Two Continents Restaurant in the Washington Hotel.

Across the yellow and brown paisley carpet, over near the puffy, golden-brown curtains is a serious and dashing young economist. Arthur Laffer. He rises to meet them.

President Gerald Ford has just put a bunch of tax hikes on the table. Cheney and Rumsfeld are spewing. They are ideologically opposed, but the only thing more unpopular than tax hikes is debt, and the US government is piling it on.

They need a way to stop this tax-hike madness in its tracks. Enter Arthur Laffer.

Over lunch, Arthur explains that there is (theoretically) a tax rate that maximises government revenue. There was an optimal tax rate.

He also says that, counter to what most people think, raising taxes doesn’t always increase total revenue.

He put it like this. If the tax rate was zero, then the government’s take is nothing. Zero percent of anything is zero. However, if the tax rate is 100%, then the government takes everything and all economic activity ceases. Why work if the government takes everything you’ve got? At this point, the government’s tax take is also zero. 100% of zero is zero.

So somewhere between the zero take at zero percent, and the zero take at 100% is an optimal tax rate that maximises government revenue.

Arthur got out a napkin and drew a diagram to help them understand what he was saying. It looked like this:

He never invented the concept, and it was never particularly insightful, but this is what is now known as ‘the Laffer curve’. It made him famous and made his career. He’s still banging on about it.

Apparently Cheney wasn’t so impressed with it at the time, but others could see the implications.

If the tax rate was currently set higher than the optimal tax rate, then decreasing the tax rate could actually increase government revenue.

And if that was true then it was a magic pudding. You could give everybody a tax cut AND increase government revenues and pay for everything you needed to do.

The central idea was that tax cuts would spur economic activity and tax revenue would actually increase. There were no losers. Only winners.

(Apparently at this point Rumsfeld got so excited he bombed some remote north Asian villages.)

And so Cheney and Rumsfeld, with the intellectual cover Laffer provided, started pushing for the idea to become Republican policy.

The idea took a little while to take hold. Maybe due to modesty. There was no way of proving where the country currently sat on the Laffer curve.

It could be that the tax rate was too high. But it could also be too low, in which case cutting taxes would actually decrease revenue. There’s no practical way to know. You can’t test it.

But by the time Regan was running for office, it was a central platform. It became known as supply-side economics.

It also became known as trickle-on economics, in the sense that if you gave tax cuts to the rich, they would go and trickle on poor people.

“Edwards and I got so high last night old chap, that we stumbled into the servants quarters and took a trickle on Jeeves. Fwah fwah fwah.”

Oh no, hang on. Trickle-down. It was trickle down economics. Give money to the rich and it would trickle down through the rest of the economy, like salty champagne.

Really, how any body took these ideas seriously at the time I have no idea. But they did. And the tax cuts happened.

And the economy under Regan had a dream run for a while. And it cemented supply-side economics into conservative political lore.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against tax cuts, but I think you need to be clear why you’re doing them. Cutting taxes so you can maximise government revenue is a bit silly. I don’t even think ‘maximising government revenue’ is a worthwhile aim.

(We should be aiming to keep revenue to a minimum, subject to achieving our social goals.)

But the real fallacy I think is imagining that tax cuts will have a permanent affect on activity.
At best they create a temporary stimulus to the economy, that slowly works its way through the system, and ultimately disappears from the growth rate stats.

That is, tax cuts cause a level shift (which might be awesome if that’s what you need), but not a permanent change to potential growth rates.

And in a mature economy, where consumption is maxed out, like in Australia – then that tax-cut stimulus will trickle-down and pool in the prices of fixed-assets – property to be specific.

And this is what we saw with Regan. Supply-side economics created a land-price boom that took ten years to work through the system.

And now there’s Trump. He’s definitely the most aggressive trickle-on’er since Regan (especially if you believe the Russian dossier).

Modelling shows that most of his proposed tax cuts will go to the top 1% of income earners, who are right now giddily trickling their names into the snow outside the White House.

Laugh it up, but we know that property and land will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the tax cuts.

And if other countries feel competitively pressured to follow Trump’s tax cuts, then we’re potentially looking at another global land-price boom.

Comments

Fantastic analysis of the situation. Probably the smartest thing to do would be invest in Merrill Lynch, Citibank, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs for the next 10 years. Just make sure you sell them before the bubble bursts because now they are repealing the Frank Dodd safeguards on Wall Street some of those big banks will go under like last time but probably in a record breaking way.

But I don’t see how “property and land [could] be the ultimate beneficiaries of the tax cuts.” How can “Land” benefit? I’m a block of land. I want that crap (buildings, drains, driveways, PEOPLE, etc) off my back, thanks!

The beneficiaries will be the already wealthy, those with the ability to buy the over-priced land. They will own the land. The average person and those of lower socio-economic status will not be able to afford to own land. They will be leveraged off it by rates, taxes, insurance, “compliance costs” etc. Then, they will have to pay rent… What rich “person” is going to allow them to live on their land, for free?

It’s all going to end badly, if that happens. When the people have nothing left to lose, they will become uncontrollable, and very dangerous. The stuff of anarchy and revolution. Too many people now know too much to let that happen peacefully, right Ron? Good thing so many Americans have lots of guns. They might be needing ’em.

When almost everyone is forced to become tenants on the planet’s surface, we will have returned to Feudalism, wherein the vast, poor majority are enslaved to the rich minority landowners.

The trick to maintaining social stability recently has been to ensure the poor have just enough to survive minimally well, not so little that they become discontented. Enslavement has become voluntary, in the form of loans, gadgets and mortgages. Make it compulsory again and there will be trouble…

If that’s where Donald is headed, then Yep, his policies are definitely gonna reshape something. He won’t be around too long, in that case.

i never thought of it like that. my knowledge of anything to do with money is that one has to minimise expenditure. it doesn’t matter how much income one has coming in (within reason) but how much one keep(retain). unfortunately, as governments of various sorts; federal, state or local don’t really know much about good financial housekeeping we find our country and state in a financial mess. local government can just increase land rates to balance the books so they are unavoidable since they ‘ride’ with the property. council rates have first priority over every/anything else as you well know. and the people pay.

mr. trump. jonno, he has to survive the onslaught of media, military and islamic forces in the coming weeks to implement anything to do with cutting taxes. i would think that tax cuts are as far removed from his mind at the moment as going to the final of the tiddly winks competition at oodnadatta. (south australia). can you imagine a more tangled mess in the world today than the present miasma of deceit, insurgency and plain hypocracy evident right now. almost every court in usa is against him. the genera situation is one of ‘stop trump’; block any and everything he does or proposes.

what is most on his mind is the stopping of mindless immigration policies from islamic countries and mexico. we in australia are not privy to any news of consequence from the media. we have to resort to the internet to gain any insight of ‘current affairs’., a source that was unavailable to us a few years ago. but, jonno, a good article about messrs rumsveld, cheney and reagan. it shows us what happens at high levels of government etc. meanwhile us lemmings continue to ‘pay through the nose’ at almost every turn in oz. the oz credit card is almost ‘maxed out’ and the politicians (federal)are still
worried about gay marriage and refugees on some remote island or other. my thought is that oz is already over populated. that might seem preposterous but one has to look at the sydney/ melbourne axis (that is the most cared for part of oz) to see what is happening. do we really need metropolises of 10-12 million people? and nobody wants to live at tarcoola or manangatang west. we all wanna cling to the coastal fringe or live in the ‘big smoke’..already the country has been ravaged by over farming, over grazing over everything, and we export overseas to correct the balance of payments.
every time we ‘develop’ something it decreases the ‘quality of life’ here in oz. melbourne is stuck with countless hundreds of unlivable ‘flats’, chinese style. and more to come? oz is a very dry country. over 80% has less than 15″(375mm) of annual rainfall. 70% less than 10″(250mm). so there is a lot of ‘dry’ land west of the divide, or north of the murray or east of the darling range. the whole continent is moving n.n.e. at a rapid rate : 20 metres every 100 years or so.lol but here in perth our average rainfall was forever 35″(875mm) then about 1970+ the decrease set in. now we reckon that the average is about 28″(700mm). conversely the kimberly region is getting wetter as it moves into a more tropical zone and so is the northern parts of our country; darwin, cairns etc. should we not ‘drain the swamp’ in melbourne, sydney and adelaide and even perth? send thousands of real people to the outback, the real oz? to live in unimaginable bliss? no. i am afraid not. alas the people who make money from increased land sales would lament mightily. and the population grows and grows in the sydney/melbourne axis. and the whole world watches us, trying to figure out if house prices will rise further in those two cities. so jonno i take your point: if tax cuts can reshape the world, our world; oz. then lets go for it. nothing else really matters. and what if it did? life is about correctness and obedience say the powers that be.

now for a grammar lesson why do we always refer to ‘jimmy jones’ as ‘that’? we once used the word who or maybe whom. lets see now; oh yes ‘jonno, that is very good at writing about things’. jimmy jones which is a good lad. maybe it should be :’jonno who is good at writing(among other things) or jimmy jones, who is a good lad. next time that you read something or hear a conversation, listen in.

Finally, if mr. trump, who is a brave lad, does get around to tax cuts he will tell everybody that it is a good thing for the country/economy and who is to argue? cheers, ron

Yes, I agree with you that Australia may be reaching its population limit. It’s rather amazing, for a continent of that size, but as you say, so much of it is desert. I don’t know why all that heat can’t be used for driving solar-powered desalination plants to supply water to feed date palms or some similar, low water-demand plants and slowly try to reclaim some of the desert, but I guess it’s not cost-effective.

After having high hopes for The Don, I have to confess that my opinion of him is crashing at the moment. I certainly admired the way he (mostly) conducted himself during the campaign, but it doesn’t seem to have carried through. How many promises left to break? He seems to be turning the Office of President into a Big Business Round Table Feeding Pen, with big business bosses looking over his shoulder as he signs out legislation that might have constrained their corporate profits. Drain the Swamp has turned into Drain the Ocean (There are fish, oil, minerals down there! Let’s Go Get ‘Em!) Makes Dubya look like a toddler.

Under Don, the whole family (except Melania?) and all his big business mates seem to be getting his help to promote their own interests, far ahead of doing what a President is supposed to do. Where are you getting your intel, and do you still think he’s doing anything right?

In the US, and many former British colonies, the law used to be set up (very wisely and responsibly) to protect the powerless man and woman on the street from the over-zealous excesses of rampant governments and their power-intoxicated (power-crazed) small-minded little “public servants”. And their leaders. Slowly but surely, those laws have been progressively eroded until it’s the other way around. Now, the courts (most often) simply rule (simplistically, without looking at the law or at the case from any grown up perspective) in favour of the enforcing agency, right or wrong. From there, it’s turning towards supporting and protecting Big Businesses over the man and woman on the street. Under Don, seems that pace just leapt into High OverDrive.

What’s Don doing that is actually good for the ordinary people of America? Yeah, even that minority bunch of suckers who voted him in? Seems to me he’s suddenly gone blind – to them. (I’m still way glad that Hillarious didn’t get in, but very disappointed in Don’s performance!)

Wonder what Jonno thinks about him now. I guess, if Don’s going to push up property prices, most people here will be happy. As some have already admitted.

hi al, i cannot bring up that ‘Global Warfare.org’ site as yet. but i keep trying. just in passing it seems that the ‘war’ in afghanistan was all about the ‘guarding’ of the enormous poppy crops which the c.i.a. was growing. the nasty ‘taliban’ had already destroyed many thousands of acres of poppy crops prior to the arrival of the american military. then oz and uk and n.z. joined in the party. plane loads of drugs went henceforth to washington for ‘distribution’. looks like an action replay of vietnam. we lost a prime minister over that one. (harold holt). so one can readily see that smoke and mirrors will beat logic any day of the week. propaganda is a wonderful means of controlling the masses and it all starts in grade one at the local primary school. i am so worried/sad. but what was the alternative?

Hi Ron,
Thanks for the usual shot of excellent inside knowledge. Yep, nothing really surprises me about the reasons for US overseas wars any more. They carefully instigate most of them, in order to rape and pillage the victim nations. Apparently, even European countries are in on the Drug Distribution racket. Not sure if their supplies go through Washington, but I’m pretty sure the British Royalty has a large influence over the whole thing. NZ, Oz and the US are all “Business Units” reporting to the British Crown. No doubt Canada and every other former colony as well.

Yep, propaganda is behind almost everything now. And dealing with the sheeple who believe it and implement it is so frustrating, infuriating even.

Jon. Where do you think Australia is on the curve? Perhaps if Sydney and Melbourne struggling taxpayers were given some tax relief it may push up realestate prices but everywhere else the economy is struggling.

WA is in a recession because we are getting totally ripped off with an unfair GST share, increasing land taxes, council rates, water rates, health costs and power costs while pay rates and working hours are dropping and the unemployment rate is increasing. Both major political parties are on a debt driven spending spree. Last year 31 building companies in WA went into receivership and already this year another major company has gone into receivership. Clearly the WA economy is struggling under its existing tax burden. WA would benefit hugely if it got its fair share of the GST revenue and struggling workers got some tax relief.

Social welfare soaks up 40% of tax revenue. Surely by providing company tax relief to create jobs that will take people off social welfare and increase tax revenue.

Australia seems to have a lot of vocal bleeding heart social welfare organisations calling for higher taxation rates so more taxpayers money can be thrown at the innumerable number of victim groups. People are now better off being social welfare dependant “victims” who get everything provided for them compared to being a struggling taxpayers who has to support all these “victims”. We only need to look at the overly generous aboriginal welfare schemes to see how that keeps the “victims” in a poverty trap.

Australia is going to be forced to make some hard decisions on cutting taxation and welfare spending to make our economy competitive in the world markets in which we operate. If we don’t make these decision we will become just like the European socialist basket case economies where huge numbers of people are living in poverty and the city and the country is sold to fr to overseas countries.

I can see see Australia’s debt getting so high that we have to sell out to the Chinese and Australia will be owned by the Chinese. The only real way out this downward debt spiral is to provide tax relief and to the productive parts of our economy and to cut back on the excessive spending on social welfare.

John from Perth, WA is in recession because the mining boom ended not because they don’t get their share of GST. Lol. Without mining, WA would be a Cinderella state like SA, apologies to SA. No, on second thought NO apologies to SA – EVER! Especially after their shameful mismanagement of electricity supply in that state. For decades both SA and WA were subsidized by the east coast states and they were both happy with that. Then the iron-ore boom happened, WA became the boom state with massive economic growth, population growth and even their property market boomed.

The first time I ever went to Perth a RE agent told me no-one rents units in Perth because houses were so cheap. Not anymore. But it’s all over. The boom has gone. And WA wants to change the rules again. Frankly, not many people would want to live in WA unless there was some income advantage. On my last trip to Perth, it was still the most expensive city in Australia to buy a drink at a pub or bar, eat at a restaurant or buy anything at a shop. Even though the mining boom had ended!! I caught a train from Burswood into Perth City, couldn’t buy a ticket because the platform machine wasn’t working (the sign said “no worries, just buy a ticket in Perth”), got into Perth and was arrested by an army of rail security officers (speaking with accents so thick, they obviously got into WA from India the day before) who booked me for travel without a ticket – welcome to Perth. Does WA spend more on security and administration than it does on running the place properly? That might be the problem.

WA still can’t seem to come to terms with shops opening on Sunday, gay rights, Aboriginals cooking in hot Police vans or the 21st century. Judging the Australian economy from a WA perspective might not be the best context to come from. Looks like the current state government will lose the next election because of the end of the mining boom. Ironic? Will WA vote in the opposition who are anti-mining and more interested in giving you gay rights, aboriginal rights, refugee rights and windmills. God help you. But at least property prices are coming down.

WA would be be far better off it succeeded from the rest of Australia. It is total bull if you think WA and SA have been subsidised by the rest of Australia. WA only gets 30.3% of its GST tax back and it also earns 80% of Australia’s export income. The rest of Australia would be even more of an economic basket case if wasn’t subsidised by ripped of Western Australians.

The South Australian economy has been getting trashed by Federal government’s spending our tax dollars on buying stuff from overseas that should be built in SA. SA’s car industry has been trashed by government red tape, militant unions and excess taxation that make manufacturing uncompetitive. The power mess that South Australia is in is due to federal government decision making to make SA the Guinea pig for testing insane renewable energy targets. Don’t laugh at what has happened in SA as that renewable energy mess will be rolled out by Labor government’s wherever they can get away with it.

However, I agree with your sentiments on WA major political parties being totally incompetent. I hope the majors get a boot up their arses at the next election and one of the minor parties take over governing WA.

More succession talk? – give me a break. Before GST and the export of Iron ore, WA was subsidized by the Eastern states in Federal funding – for decades. That’s a simple fact of history. We in the East were happy to do that for WA so that you sandgropers wouldn’t go poor with begging bowls in the streets. Since the boom in Iron ore exports, WA has turned around and done quite well – we’re glad! But they negotiated for an arrangement on GST that suited them. When the boom ended, WA wanted more GST back than had been negotiated. Fair enough, that is progressing and Tony Abbott gave WA a shitload of money to tide them over. No thanks for that obviously? But the other states and territories that are subsidized by NSW, VIC & QLD i.e. Tas, SA, NT and ACT still want to suck us dry and oppose every move by the Feds to redistribute more GST back to WA.

SA is a joke. The Fairy, sorry Festival, state is heavily subsidized and its car industry was so subsidized that it would have been cheaper to pay their workers $100K/yr to stay home than continue making cars there, which again I was happy to tolerate. But the carmakers wanted more or they would leave. Joe Hockey said no and the rest is history. The submarine build industry in SA is on just as big a subsidy by the rest of Australian taxpayers. The windfarm debacle in SA is all of their own making. If they had kept just one coal-fired baseload station open the blackouts would not have occurred. The Federal target for renewables is 26% not 40% as had already occurred in SA.

Interesting article. What is often overlooked in the tax debate is the effect levels of goverment has on “tax waste” – taxes spent with little economic return overall. Take local councils – high rates which go more and more to increasing council salaries (3 times inflation pa.) and not to infrastructure (Ave council CEO is on $350,00 pa in Vic) and road and footpath repair fall behind as councils rely on new estates to build the infrastructure including drainage and supply public space land without cost to council and outsource service on a user pays basis. State Governments increasingly outsource or sell public assets and utilities tgo private companies which are then forced to increase costs to consumers while paying taxes on their profits. Rail; Road; Tram networks remain stagnant until taken over by private companies who use tolls or reduced services to survive which increase costs to consumers and add to tax income for government. Federal Governments are the “overlay” of inefficiency in the use of taxes and wasted spending. Take for instance federal departments of Health or Education – how many patients are treated in federal hospitals? (none as there are no federal hospitals); how many people are educated in federal schools ?(ditto). Many Federal government departments are just public servants (oxymoron “servant”) collecting or controlling duplications in the tiers of government and rarely produce any real end benefit to the economy at large. Look at any budget papers and every department in state federal and local government have “Miscellaneous” expenditure (of at least $1millon). Another part of the waste factor are the comparison of government employee and parliamentarian salaries to commercial levels – many public servants if sent to the “commercial world” would have trouble i) finding a role for their ability or skill level & ii) getting anywhere near the level of salary they currently enjoy. Would the CEO of Australia Post be able to run a bank for which his salary is compared? One reason governments are loathe to reduce or eliminate negative gearing as many public servants are ‘investors’ in the housing market and that would lose a fair % of votes if they did that! Reducing taxes on profits usually benefits overseas owned companies and since the late 1950’s hasn’t changed the unemployment levels which always hover around the 5-6% of the workforce. Cutting taxes won’t improve economic efficiency.

Here in Auckland, Price to Yield (ROI) has dropped to hell. The only cashflow-positive properties are apartments and Home & Income type properties (which are rare as rocking horses’, and competitively sought after.) We ain’t buying because there’s no return. Sure, other investors are still buying, but I’m not sure why. Hoping prices will keep going, I guess. (OTOH, my rich mate has already sold ALL of his, except his CBD Garage property.)

But prices are stagnating, and the only way they can keep rising is by selling out the country to more rich immigrants. Will you be happy living in a country that is foreign to you, and in which your affluence has been diminished? I’m already not happy about it.

The people you need to pay your rents can’t afford it, and are already moving out into their cars, welfare homes, back with parents, in with children, under bridges, down south, (out West), into the bush, anywhere but your rental.

well, well peter. the smart arse from the east. stay in your fleshpot. we in the wild west wanna secede from you buggers over there anyway!. the only, ONLY reason we could not secede the last time we had a referendum, was because some homesick eastern state miners voted to stay in the federation.

we carried you buggers in the past 20 years, so keep your stupid ideas back where you are. i would be quite happy to build a bloody ‘trump’ wall at eucla. then you would need a passport to get in here.

its the best place in our country, idiot. and what of the sporting heroes from our wee population? they are so numerous i cannot list them here. it is indeed unfortunate that our state ‘government’, like all governments the world over, are victims of democracy. like don johnson writes, all governments duplicate and do all sorts of mad things in the name of progress and demand high salaries..and cannot be fired because of some anochranistic law about public servants being sacrosant. what a stuff up by the people to let these buffoons run the country..into the ground.
anyway i have a few friends over in vic. so i cannot get too rough on this issue. and ‘timo’ grab a brain.

I’ve been considering what would be involved in WA seceding. My understanding is it would need to be done by referendum where a majority of people and majority of states vote yes. In other words it would require eastern states to do a favour for WA and the chances of that are zilch.

However, perhaps we can bring other dudded states along with us so they could also get away from being ripped off and stuffed around by Federal Government lefty politically correct elites.

The idea is to have a majority of states and territories vote to jointly secede. I think we could join with SA Qld Vic and the NT to secede and leave the highly subsidised states and territories of Tas, NSW, and ACT to be dictated to and to pay for the money wasting out of touch, red tape duplicating federal system.

Ron, maybe you missed the opportunity of reading Will Rogers’ observations? He pointed out, in the 1930s I think, that money trickles up, not down. He clarified that by pointing out something to the effect that if you give poor people money then the rich will have it back by nightfall. But at least the poor will have had the pleasure of it passing through their hands. Jon’s observations are spot-on to the best of my knowledge (and I have an economics degree thanks to the Australian tax-payers). Reagan was good in a variety of ways, but he believed Cheney and Rumsfeld and promised to cut taxes. So he carried out his promise, knowingly running the US into huge debt. Bill Clinton paid a lot of it off, then George W jumped into wars all over the place and ran the debt up again. In the meantime Cheney, Rumsfeld and fellow snouts in the trough around the Republican leaders ever since have profited unbelievably from property, and army contracts, etc. Reagan removing the Glass-Seagall Act at their behest enabled the bank fraud that created the GFC.

Not sure what your comments on WA versus the rest has to do with Jon’s comments, but WA has had a very good run over the decades out of whining about how much better you are, and more deserving, so the Commonwealth/State relations have provided a very good bonus out of federal tax, following the states handing taxing powers to the Commonwealth to fund WWII. NSW and Vic in particular have given you money most of the time since then. So your roads are good in comparison, etc. WA has been pretty much the only area to benefit from the mining boom there, through the few people being employed in mining, being able to cause a boost in Perth property prices. The higher $A out of it has pretty much destroyed manufacturing and thereby, employment, in the east. The idiots we have in Parliament led by Abbott the rabbit cut taxes on the miners in the biggest boom they have ever seen, so the country got very little out of it. I read recently that Gina paid 45% of mining taxes paid in the last period. She gets my respect for that. It’s a good indicator of how much tax BHP, RIO and the Swiss bloke didn’t pay.

Ian, Just because some bloke in the 1930s was promoting helicopter money doesn’t mean it works. In fact Juila Gillard showed it doesn’t work and it just create debt for future generations to pay. That Gillard helicopter money mainly went into buying overseas tvs and was feed into pokies and didn’t do anyone any good. If the government want to throw money around to stimulate the economy we would all be better off than if they spent the money on things that have a payoff like spending it on infrastructure that has economic benefits.

You are completely deluded if you think WA has been getting its fair share of its tax payments. We only get 30.3% of our GST back, 40% of our fuel excise back. The federal government got huge tax windfalls from the mining boom. Gillard hated WA and totally wanted to rip WA off with her mining tax.

The thing to remember is that mining is it is a high risk boom and bust industry. Revenues from the booms are needed to ride out the busts. If penalty taxes are imposed on the mining industry no one would invest in mining and Australias only world competitive industry would be trashed.

It is completely unfair to blame the high dollar during the mining boom on the trashing of our manufacturing industry. The high dollar was a result of high interest rates due to the government spending money like there was no tomorrow. Gillard and Rudd were fiscally irresponsible and should have been saving money during the boom rather than spending it on unsustainable social welfare schemes that are running our country into huge debt.

Americas debt at 100% of GDP. America has tried the up down principles , the side to side wobble.
It has had its top to bottom collapse .On the last one paid the perpetrators.
If this is Capitalism, What is Sanity!

hi ian, i know what you mean, but not everybody gets ‘top dollar’, from their efforts, otherwise the country would not run at all. imagine everyone getting $200,000 per year. so if one is to receive say about $70,000 per year (which is about $57,000 after government theft : tax) then one must be prudent with expenditure, don’t you agree? and john , it is with great pleasure that i agree with you. ‘nation states’ are the order of the day..so lets have western australia and the rest can do what they like. i am quite sure that we will survive and we won’t have bloody canberry telling us what to do. remember this, that if an enemy attacked us, the eastern seaboard would be the first and only place the australian government would defend or care about. history has proven this beyond doubt. so stuff the oz ‘government’ they are and always have have been a mob of bloodsucking varmints. ask any eastern stater about the west. oh that little oasis over there somewhere. enough said.

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